5 Year Report

Happy New Year everybody! im a few hours away on my 4th year of doing this. I almost made it to five digits. nowhere close to my goals but I’ve come to accept my trajectory and just happily go with the flow. hopefully once things open up and go back to normal (2022?) things might start snowballing for me as i’ve made good strides in my networking & opportunities (and also based on everyones 5th year data). hope everyone had a good year and may a successful 2022 come upon us all.

Happy New Year to everyone!

Thanks boinkeee2000 for adding to the knowledge.

After 3 and a half years, here’s my experience.

I started doing library music in May 2018 to build up a royalty income stream over time. I did a lot of research on the internet… and MLR has been my primary source of information and inspiration. Thanks to all the amazing industry veterans here.

I produce about 100 – 120 tracks per year for libraries across RF and exclusive streams. I currently have about 250 RF tracks and 195 Exclusive tracks. Starting 2021, I have reduced submissions to RF sites in a big way. To be precise, I uploaded only 33 tracks to RF sites in 2021 (Many of these were rejects from my exclusive libraries).

This has been my career trajectory so far.

May 2018 – started uploading to RF sites
Aug 2018 – started seeing sales on RF sites
Sep 2019 – joined first exclusive library
Jun 2020 – Started receiving backend
Mar 2021 – joined 2nd exclusive library

Earnings

2018 (5 months of earnings)
RF – $ 137.60
Backend – $ 0
Total – $137.60

2019
RF – $ 3937.63
Backend – $ 0
Total – $ 3937.63

2020
RF – $ 4380.29
Backend – $ 1203.06 (90% of this is from a single RF track earning backend in Romania)
Total – $ 5583.35

2021
RF – $ 3324.64
Backend – $ 1703.65 (Still, about 60-65% of this is from the same RF track in Romania)
Sync – $ 591.53
Total – $ 5619.82

In summary
1. RF sites did well the first 2 years and then nosedived… at the moment, they seem to be a losing bet. I now upload tracks rejected by exclusive libs to RF sites. This is not necessarily a winning strategy as the kind of music that does well on RF sites is much different to the music that’s requested by the exclusive libraries that I am in.
2. On the other hand, one could also speculate that the reason RF sales dropped so much is due to my not having uploaded as many tracks as the 2 years prior.
3. I got lucky with one RF track getting me a consistent amount of backend over these beginning years. It’s kept me going as my exclusive catalog grows slowly and starts accumulating its own backend.
4. Admittedly, I have been focusing more on quantity than quality. Starting 2022, I plan to pay much more attention to the latter.

It would be great if the others on this thread updated their latest milestones so all of us can learn something.

All the best to all of us!